Rationale for the existence of souls

Does the soul exist? Does death exist? Do ghosts exist? Even if we don’t subscribe to the belief or reality of our soul’s existence, at several points in our lives we in India particularly hear that aatma kabhi martee nahi, aatma amar hai—the soul never dies, the soul is immortal. In November 2016 and then in January this year, UK’s Daily Express reported sensational claims made by scientists that the human consciousness lives on after death.

Sean Martin wrote that “The possibility of life after death is one of the greatest mysteries of humanity, but now experts are claiming that there is no death of consciousness—just death of the body… According to some well-respected scientists, quantum mechanics allows consciousness to live on following the body’s eventual demise…While scientists are still unsure about what exactly consciousness is, the University of Arizona’s Stuart Hameroff believes that it is merely information stored at a quantum level…British physicist Sir Roger Penrose agrees and believes he and his team have found evidence that protein-based microtubules—a structural component of human cells—carry quantum information— information stored at a sub-atomic level.”

Sir Roger states if a person temporarily dies, this quantum information is released from the microtubules and into the universe. However, if they are resuscitated the quantum information is channeled back into the microtubules and that is what sparks a near death experience. Sir Roger added: “If they’re not revived, and the patient dies, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.”

Researchers from the renowned Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich agree and state that the physical universe that we live in is only our perception and once our physical bodies die, there is an infinite beyond. Some believe that consciousness travels to parallel universes after death. “The beyond is an infinite…